Cell’s attempt to bring The Pulse to the big screen flatlines.
Phones have done terrible things to society, but Cell makes the strongest case yet for turning yours off and chucking it into the sea. Adapted, though that word feels generous, from Stephen King’s 2006 novel, Cell is a feature-length dial tone: flat, repetitive, and so irritating it makes you long for the sweet release of voicemail.
The problems begin in an airport, where graphic novelist Clay Riddell (John Cusack) witnesses a bizarre, frenzied outbreak as people suddenly begin attacking each other in animalistic, twitchy spasms, triggered by their mobile phones. Teaming up with a train driver named Tom (Samuel L Jackson) and a teen survivor (Isabelle Fuhrman), Clay embarks on a desperate journey north to find his estranged son, hoping the signal that broke the world hasn’t claimed him too.
Cell arrives late to a party already haemorrhaging guests. By 2016, the zombie genre was shambling due to fatigue rather than rigor mortice. The Walking Dead had passed its creative peak but still dominated screens, and World War Z was three years gone but not forgotten. South Korea had just delivered Train to Busan, a reminder of what urgency, emotion, and clarity of purpose could do to inject a bit of life into the undead but Cell reverses the charges and shuffles in like a forgotten Syfy pilot.
The casting should have been the film’s saving grace. Cusack and Jackson, in their short scenes together in 1408 developed a compelling chemistry, but the reunion feels like a grim reminder that lightning rarely strikes twice, even when you’re dicking around with cell phone towers. Cusack looks actively disengaged from the material, trudging his way through the script while Jackson seems more frustrated by the material than the collapse of civilisation.
The source material itself isn’t without issues; it’s one of King’s weakest novels, shaggy and experimental with tonal shifts that test patience, but Cell strips out the ambiguity and replaces it with confusion. The “phone pulse” concept, rich with metaphor in print, becomes incoherent on screen and the film makes no serious attempt to explore what the signal is, who’s behind it, or what’s actually happening to the infected. One minute they’re zombie-like; the next they’re standing in fields humming, like a rehearsal for a 1970s Coke commercial. What’s really diluted, though, is the novel’s simmering cynicism. Cell was King’s furious little jab at how modern life had been hijacked by mobile phones, not just in their ubiquity, but in their capacity to isolate us under the guise of constant connection. It’s clumsy satire, sure, but it had teeth and the book’s “pulse” was both literal and symbolic: a digital howl that wipes the hard drive of human identity.
King co-wrote the screenplay with Adam Alleca (The Last House on the Left remake), but whatever creative intention was present seems to have run out of data. The novel’s bleak open-endedness is botched by a climax that opts for ambiguity without atmosphere, and a final scene so smugly opaque it feels like a prank. This is adaptation by autocorrect: wrong word, wrong tone, wrong message, shot with a grey-brown colour palette that renders every scene indistinct, the cinematography giving off strong straight-to-DVD energy.
The opening scene of the airport descending into chaos is brisk and unsettling, and the eerie flocking behaviour of the “phoners” hints at more interesting networks than the film wants to connect to and after a promising start, it switches to battery saver mode, content to simply idle from plot point to plot point, leaving its two wasted leads with zero bars to work with.
